McArdle: A dozen rules for free speech

Wednesday

If you write a column about athletes kneeling during the national anthem, you can expect to find yourself rapidly mired in debates about free speech.

Because speech is nuanced and complex, there will always be an element of "I know it when I see it" in placing cases into "protected" or "unprotected" categories. What we ought to be able to agree on is some principles for making free speech better.

And in that spirit, I'll go first.

• Principle No. 1: Don't burn flags. In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that a communist agitator named Gregory Lee Johnson had a First Amendment right to burn a flag in protest outside the Republican National Convention. The Supreme Court was right. Johnson was not.

Burning flags is an incredibly stupid mode of speech, and you should refrain from it. Good free speech does not include "sending people I dislike into a hopping mad rage for the sheer joy of watching their spittle fly."

People who are actually fond of the thing you are insulting — whether it's the American flag, feminism or something else — take only one message from your speech: The speaker is a jerk.

When it comes to not standing for the anthem, I understand why people might feel inclined to that refusal; I respect their right to refuse. But why handicap yourself before you've really gotten into the argument?

• Principle No. 2: Don't preach to the choir (too much). We all need affirmation. The appropriate space for this is the privacy of your own home, or a conveniently located bar. It's not the public square.

Don't give yet another speech about how right you are and how dumb your opponents are. Don't write that article. Don't send that tweet. Don't. What do you expect to achieve if you spend most of your time convincing people who already agree with you that you're not just right but really, really, really right?

• Principle No. 3: Don't confuse your enjoyment with your effectiveness. When I was in college, I went to a lot of protests for various left-wing causes. I enjoyed them a lot. But over time, I noticed they mostly seemed to be effective at building strong networks of people who liked to stand out in the sun and chant. Tangible action seemed to occur elsewhere.

That's not to say that protest never works. But it is seductively easy to confuse holding a sign with actually having accomplished something.

• Principle No. 4: Don't start talking if you aren't ready for people to talk back. One of the laziest, most destructive ideas in modern debate is some version of "It's time for men to stop talking and listen to women about sexism in the workplace."

That's just one example of a common phenomenon: people saying that we need a "national conversation" about gender, or race, or some other issue — and then making it clear that their idea of a "conversation" is that they get to deliver a stiff lecture, while the folks on the other side alternate between listening raptly and apologizing profusely.

Return to your dictionary and reacquaint yourself with the meaning of the word "conversation."

• Principle No. 5: Always explore the option of ignoring provocative speech. Despite my best efforts here, a lot of people are going to burn flags, actual or rhetorical. Because their highest joy is seeing their opponents turn an exotic shade of purple, they will try to do this as ostentatiously as possible.

When it comes to responding to people who are trying to provoke you, not responding should always be your first resort, not your last.

• Principle No. 6: Don't go looking for reasons to get mad. I happened to be talking recently to a doctor who specializes in addiction, and he noted the similarities between people who spend their days cruising the internet, looking for things to be mad about, and stimulant addicts.

Both of them are seeking a quick adrenaline rush. But oh, rage is intoxicating.

Rage is only good for fighting, never good for boring old democratic tasks such as achieving consensus and compromise.

• Principle No. 7: Try very hard not to punish people for their speech. Free speech doesn't, and shouldn't, mean consequence-free speech. But a healthy society allows for as much free expression as possible, and that means allowing people very wide latitude for holding and expressing opinions we really don't like.

There's no principle that can cover every eventuality, but this one should usually do the trick: Err on the side of giving people freedom of conscience wherever possible.

• Principle No. 8: Try to leave politics at home sometimes. You've decided to support Donald Trump in the 2016 election? Well, I disagree with you, friend, rather vehemently, but I'm sure you have your reasons. And I'm interested in hearing about those reasons.

Only please, not during my sister's wedding. There's a place and time for political arguments. But that is not all places and all times.

• Principle No. 9: Don't engage with anything for the purposes of mindlessly dismissing it. The retweet of a political opponent with the single remark "LOL.” The Facebook post that begins "I literally can't understand how anyone could believe … ." The blog post that consists of saying "Can you believe someone actually said this?"

This juvenilia is beneath you. For your own sake, eschew it.

• Principle No. 10: Read charitably. Speak charitably. Two of the worst features of academic writing are wild over-citation and abundant restatements of the obvious. Academics are writing in a defensive crouch, trying to ward off all possible criticisms that could ever be made of their work.

Alas, most of us cannot write or speak for an audience composed mostly of a few dozen other people who are getting paid to wade through acres of barren defensive verbiage. So we have some things unsaid and others moderately ambiguous.

Assume that the speaker is a good person who, just like you, wants good things for the world. Seek to understand their motives and thinking, not condemn them.

• Principle No. 11: Never go full-frontal jerk on the internet. In the early years of blogging, a whole lot of people — including me — made the same mistake: They wrote a lengthy screed about how someone was a total idiot who knew nothing about some topic ... only to discover that they had misread the purported idiot, or misunderstood one of the central facts.

If you attack them as hapless half-wits of notoriously low moral character, and then it turns out you made a mistake ... well, now you have an ugly dilemma.

• Principle No. 12: Prepare to be wrong. If you're going to speak, you're going to make mistakes. If you write on the internet, those mistakes will be around to haunt you for decades.

So prepare to make mistakes and acknowledge that you've made them. Then move onward in your journey of discovery so that you can find out what your next mistake will be.

Megan McArdle is a Washington Post columnist.

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